Writing in the NY Times Economix blog on May 25, economist Nancy Folbre wrote an entry "Hard Times for the Kids" based on a newly released report (pdf) from the Child and Youth Well-Being Index Project at Duke University:
The project regularly publishes a Child Well-Being Index (C.W.I.) - a kind of check-up list for children's social health. Family economic well-being is measured by a composite of the poverty rate, median annual income, parental employment and health insurance coverage for children.
The complete C.W.I. includes measures from six other domains in addition to family economic well-being: health, safety and behavior, education, community connectedness, social relationships, and emotional and spiritual well-being. The domains are equally weighted and their values compared to levels in the base year of 1975.
While the CWI is slightly higher than it was in 1975, those gains could well be wiped out in the next few years of recession.
The CWI is generically similar to the Human Development Index I wrote about yesterday, in that both are multi-factor measures of human well-being, but the HDI is relatively closely tied to a single economics measure, and only combines factors from three different domains, compared to the broader diversity described above (a complete list of the basic measures used can be found on the flip.) As a result, the CWI shows a marked decline during the early Reagan era which marks the lasting impact of the double-dip recession of 1980/82, and widespread deindustrialization the resulted--impacts that military-Keynsian "Reagan boom" papered over in terms of GDP growth, but that were deeply felt in millions of childrens lives:
This second chart more fully shows how the trajectory of different domains varied widely over this period, a clear indication that money alone cannot solve all problems, and the public policies matter deeply:
